Vignette 41: Miles Jenner of Harvey's Brewery (Part 2)

Brewer vignettes feature quotes I've picked up in my travels and writing. In 40 previous editions, I never saw a need to do give a brewer two entries. But few brewers are Miles Jenner, who has spent most of his lifetime at the wonderful old Victorian brewery, Harvey's. It's in Lewes, Sussex, just about as far South as you can go on the island. Find more vignettes here.

Today we’re going to hear Mr. Jenner describe Harvey’s yeast strain, it’s wonderful secret ingredient (a second, slumbering strain), and how all that plays out in what many people believe is the best bitter made in the United Kingdom, Sussex Best. As you will hear, his very long brewing life has made him something of a philosopher and a poet.

The Yeast
”In the 1950s we had yeast from a company called the British Pure Yeast Company. It was like supplying powdered yeast today. What they did is go to Burton breweries, take cultures from those breweries that were surplus from fermentation, and then deliver them down to small breweries who wanted a change of yeast every few weeks because they didn’t keep their own yeast. But they wanted a consistent yeast they could use. So that was the case right up until about 1956, when that company went out of business. They said, ‘You get your yeast from Ind Coope of Burton. Write to them; you’ll be fine.’ It wasn’t, to cut a long story short. It was the wrong brewery; they’d clattered off and we didn’t know where it had come from.”

“We started a long search to find a yeast that would actually work. We eventually got it from the Tadcaster Brewery in Yorkshire and it was sent down by passenger train. It went from York to Lewes overnight and we pitched it and have been using it ever since. Touch wood.”

“It’s settled down to the Sussex air. It was a single strain yeast and it’s now mutated into two different strains--but with identical DNA. They had mutual benefit to each other. They slide in and out of proportion; it doesn’t seem to make much odds which way they go. It’s exactly the same yeast cell, it just [has] slightly different characteristics. It doesn’t seem to affect it whether it’s 90/10 in one direction or the other. It’s normally around a 40/60, 45/55 balance. We keep our eye on that and twice a year we do a complete classification. We are cropping the yeast on the third day, putting it into cold store, bringing it out the following week and putting it into vessel. So we’ve never actually cultured it.”

““This is our Russian stout bubbling away, the Imperial Extra Double Stout. I have been letting off 30 pounds of pressure a day on this because it was secondary fermentation going literally wild. We have a secondary yeast that is right in the background called Debaryomyces hansenii, and after the brewery yeast is knackered and has completely given up, there’s a long lag phase and then that kicks in and goes through a secondary fermentation--and that’s what we’re doing here at the moment.The first time we brewed it we were doing it in cork bottles and we had sent a load to America when, to my horror, I saw the samples in my office slowly expanding, with the cork rising up through the foil and eventually hitting the roof like an exploding champagne bottle.”

Sussex Best Bitter
“The beer was first produced in 1955. It was introduced in a post-war period where rationing was on and the idea was that you would produce something the local people wanted. The preference was for a well-hopped beer but with a slight sweetness to it, and I think it was aided by that time of rationing. But what it did was to create a brew that had a very moreish quality. There were tweaks along the way. I’d say by 1960 it was pretty standard.”

“I’ve been drinking it far longer than I should have been because my father had a very healthy approach towards alcohol. So I was drinking beer with him from the age of four or five. You have that very strong sensory perception of it--it’s a dough-like quality the yeast gives it on occasion, the York yeast. I can drink a beer and just out of the blue I’ll be back fifty years. Like all living products, it depends on the age you drink it at, the storage, everything else.”

“I think it is very reminiscent of a best bitter in that post-war era. It has moreish quality to it, there’s a good hop balance, there’s a residual sweetness, [one has an] almost a knee-jerk reaction to go back for another sip. There’s a quality to it that makes it eminently drinkable with just about any type of food. It’s a very broad church that’s attracted to Harvey’s Sussex Bitter.”